Tag Archives | Dragon

The other day I received a package, or I should say what in hindsight seems a waste of one: a large box, inside which lay a jumbo-sized cardboard egg, from within which I plucked a tiny rectangular piece of colored paper slightly larger than a business card. On the card, a picture of an iPhone, a greenish tongue of flame, and the words “Introducing…. Dragon Go!”

This is apparently someone’s savvy marketing idea to get my attention (or squander cardboard), perhaps hoping to conjure some latent connection to the dragon eggs featured in HBO’s recently completed (and as of today, multi-Emmy-nominated) first season of Game of Thrones. Intentional or no, I’m making my way through the HBO series now, and here I am, writing about Dragon Go!. Mission accomplished, outsourced PR person!

Dragon, as many of you may know, is the call sign for a suite of speech-recognition tools, the forerunner of which, DragonDictate, was released in the early 1980s for DOS. It’s since been recognized as perhaps the most accurate of the consumer-grade speech recognition utilities (at one point, employed as a computer systems engineer, I provided tech support to a quadriplegic who used Dragon Naturally Speaking—as it was called by 1997—to run his entire home office).

Earlier this week Google Goggles launched to great fanfare. Yet I’m not so sure it’s currently “a huge leap forward in the field of visual search.” Basically, you snap a pic with your Android (1.6 or greater) device and Google does it’s best to identify it. Whatever it may be. However, in testing yesterday, Goggles kind of sucks. Evernote clearly beats it in OCR. ShopSavvy and RedLaser clearly beat it in product identification and research. But this is Google. And they’ve got more brain power and computing power than most. So it’s certainly worth keeping an eye on. In the meantime, Goggles supposedly does a good job with artwork and landmarks… if you happen to be lost in or near a notable museum.